Stories from every angle

So, another Melbourne Writers Festival winds to a close. It’s been that curious mixture of exhausting and energising, with heroes met and made.

Every festival organiser hopes for that magical combination of guests, which can elevate a decent hour’s chat into a wonderful interweaving of minds and ideas. My favourite panels saw this happen, particularly How Russia Changed My Life, featuring the charming Elif Batuman, intrepid memoirist Maria Tumarkin and the irrepressible historian Sheila Fitzpatrick; and From Woolf to Wolf, in which Sophie Cunningham, Monica Dux and Emily Maguire discussed Virginia Woolf, Naomi Wolf and Germaine Greer.

The festival hosted some international stars, including Joss Whedon and Norman Doidge, but often it’s the writers whose work I’m less familiar with whose stories really affect and delight me. On Sunday, at Magazine, Jake Adelstein, whose book Tokyo Vice tells of how he faced intimidation from the yakuza, read from a deleted chapter of his book – a comic tale of trailing an escaped monkey around Tokyo’s Nishi-Azabu area and being outdone in journalistic prowess by a nine-year-old boy. But only the day before, Adelstein movingly told the packed audience at Feddish about the real and dangerous cost of opposing the yakuza.

I loved the new venue, Feddish, where the Morning Fix sessions opened each festival day with a free smorgasbord of authors. But traditional venues continued to shine, including the Toff, which saw DBC Pierre settle back in a giant storytelling chair and artists including Clare Bowditch and Hannie Rayson re-enact Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

The parties, of course, were very good. The official opening party set the tone for a fun ten days, with the speeches including a tale of festival love and lust; and the celebration of Overland‘s 200th issue was attended by well-wishers and friends galore. A 25th birthday can never go past without at least a couple of good bashes, and at MWF’s 25th, Readings Books’ Mark Rubbo dropped by, as did Les Murray.

As a participant in the festival this year, too, I experienced many surprising and wonderful moments. During the Schools Program, I spoke with fantastic authors Gabrielle Wang, Kate Forsyth and Alice Pung; and inspiring youth leaders Chris Varney and Adam Smith. It’s so amazing to see how enthusiastic young festival-goers are about reading, books and ideas, and I have no doubt that we’ll see some of them back as guests in the future. During Kill Your Darlings‘ residency at Magazine, it was pretty wild to hear Robyn Archer sing every musical reference in her book Detritus – her live fifteen-minute snippet reel needed to be seen to be believed.

Congratulations to the fantastic festival staff and volunteers for a magnificent 2010 festival. I wish you all a good week’s sleep.

2009 MWF authors – another 2

Two more authors, as announced in the last MWF e-bulletin:

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie

Shortlisted for Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009, Kamila Shamsie will be one of our international guests at the festival. Kamila was born in 1973 in Pakistan and is the author of four previous novels: In the City by the Sea, Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron and Broken Verses. In 1999 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature and in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award – both awarded by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Kamila now lives in London.

Bolder and more ambitious than her previous novels, Burnt Shadows is a major novel, set against the backdrop of war, of intersecting lives of people from different nations and cultures. If you are a fan of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, or The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai you will enjoy Kamila Shamsie.

An absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense strength.

Salman Rushdie

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a well known face in literary Melbourne (and the photo has have given us does not do him justice!) Currently the editor of the literary journal, Overland, he first came to our attention with an intriguing slant on Melbourne, Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within. Both books should be on every Melbournian’s bookshelf. He is also the author of Communism: A Love Story (shortlisted for the 2007 Colin Roderick Award) and, his most recent book, Killing: Misadventures in Violence.

Ninety years after the First World War, the discovery of the mummified head of a Turkish soldier – a bullet-ridden souvenir brought home from Gallipoli by a returning Anzac – launched Jeff on a quest to understand the nature of deadly violence. How did ordinary people – whether in today’s wars or in 1915 – learn to take a human life? Was it hard to kill another person or was it terrifyingly easy? What did war do to soldiers to make hoarding a human head seem normal, even necessary? The questions lead Jeff on a journey through history and across the US, talking to veterans and slaughtermen, executioners and academics about one of the last remaining taboos. Compassionate, engaged and political, Killing takes us up close to the ways society kills today, in a prolonged meditation on what violence means, not just for perpetrators but for all of us.